How to Multiply Your Leads with Bulk Email Marketing

If you’re looking for a way to quickly scale up your lead generation, bulk email marketing is one of the best opportunities out there. It has vast potential and can bring in the marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) much faster than any other kind of content.

The key factor in being successful is preparing and knowing what to do before you get started.

We’re going to examine the potential of bulk email marketing and why it’s such a powerful method.

How to Multiply Your Leads with Bulk Email Marketing

It’s important to differentiate between opt-in and cold email marketing, and set your expectations accordingly. The approach we’re talking about is targeted at cold contacts; that is, people who’ve never heard of you.

Let’s consider open rate. For an opted-in list, depending on your industry, you can expect an open rate between 20% and 40%. Which makes sense, since the people receiving your email are people who have signed up and stated “I want to receive emails from you”.

Cold email requires a whole other mindset, though. The people receiving your email don’t expect it, and so you can’t expect to have the same open rates as with an opted-in list. For cold email, 3-5% open rate is considered excellent.

How Is Bulk Email Better?

If we’re talking about a tenth of the open rate, then it follows that you’d get a tenth of the leads, right? Well, no – it’s a matter of scale. The clue is in the name – you send emails in bulk, meaning your recipient list is going to be much larger than with your opt-in list.

Let’s run a quick comparison of the two. We’ll say the open rates are average: 25% for opt-in, 2.5% for cold. The maximum number of emails you can send daily from most opt-in email providers is 1000, so we’ll use that. Our list size for bulk email will be 100,000 – though you could easily send to double, triple or even ten times that many contacts if you desired.

Opt-In

Cold

Recipients

1000

100000

Open Rate

25%

2.50%

Opens

250

2500

As you can see, even with one-tenth the open rate, bulk email generates ten times the number of opens that opt-in does. And the larger your recipient list is, the more that gap widens.

As with an opted-in list, it’s important not to over-send to your cold contacts. Space out your email sends widely to avoid audience fatigue and a spike in unsubscribe rates.

What About Nurturing?

Nurturing your email leads is crucial to guiding them to a purchase. If you just blast a bottom-of-funnel message at 100,000 cold contacts trying to get them to buy your product, you’ll most likely see a huge unsubscribe rate and risk getting blacklisted for spamming – not to mention that you still won’t get the purchases you’re looking for.

Don’t try to force leads down the funnel. In fact, don’t think of your bulk email marketing as a separate entity at all. Instead, think of it as widening the top of your existing funnel. Use your bulk email to drive opt-ins and then add them to your nurturing cadences.

Once they’re well-nurtured and warmed up, then you go for the sale. If you need tips on crafting rock-star strategy and content for your emails, check out our guide to cold email copywriting.

Where Do I Get Such a Big List?

Opt-in lists are earned by constantly outputting a stream of valuable content, attending events, advertising on social media, performing SEO, and so on. All that effort yields warm, engaged leads – but at a trickle. Building a list of 100,000 subscribers would take a ridiculous amount of time.

So where do you get such an immense list?

There are numerous ways, and almost all of them are terrible ideas that do your marketing more harm than good. Take scraping, for example: there are tools out there that will crawl the internet for you and retrieve (or scrape) email addresses they find.

These bots can be highly sophisticated, able to puzzle out even email addresses that aren’t actually formatted as email addresses. For example, if you wrote out “my_email (at) provider (dot) com”, a scraper bot could still get your email from that string of text. They can generate email lists quickly, but they come with two deal-breaking problems.

The first issue is that you have no way of knowing who’s behind the email addresses. You can’t possibly know if what you’re sending is in any way relevant to them, so emailing them absolutely constitutes spam. Spamming gets you blacklisted and destroys your sender reputation, which effectively puts an end to your email marketing in general.

The second issue is that the quality of the list that these bots generate is terrible. Their sophistication works against them in that regard – let’s say they find a post somewhere that says “Everyone is at the library. Join us upstairs!”. A scraper bot would interpret that as “everyoneis@thelibrary.join”, which is obviously not actually a real email address.

Even when the email addresses it finds are real, there’s still a risk of the email being a spam trap. These are addresses that exist solely to flag spam. They may have once been actively-used addresses that have since been repurposed, or they may have been created expressly to track spam, but either way, sending to one of these can result in you being blacklisted as a spammer.

The short version is: don’t use scrapers (or scraped email lists).

The best, most reliable and safe way to acquire a large cold email list is to use a reputable data provider like ZoomInfo. You can purchase a list that’s tailored to your needs and targeted at the right audience, and be confident in the quality of the data you’re using.

What Do I Do With My New List?

You’re armed with the right expectations, a great email idea, and a brand new list of contacts. What now? We mentioned earlier that most email platforms only let you send up to 1000 emails per day, so you need something new.

The tool you’re looking for is Clickback MAIL, a platform specifically built for bulk email marketing. There’s no cap on the number of recipients you can send to, so your email campaigns can be as massive as you want. In addition, when you upload your list, every single contact is checked and verified through multiple filters to remove bad data and spam traps.

You’ll benefit from industry-leading deliverability, and everything you need to make sure your cold campaigns reach the recipient’s inbox. It checks your email content in real-time and notifies you of words, formatting and links that could negatively impact your deliverability.

Our Customer Success Team can even provide you with advice and best practices to help you make your bulk email campaigns successful.